Microsoft have a whole bunch of imo low quality doorway pages that redirect and have stuffed keywords randomly into unrelated paragraphs. Either a. they have Googles permission or b. They are extracting the urine (taking the p***).

Do a search for "Broadcast automation India", "Hosting management Australia" or "Education software Asia". Right at the top (at least from my german ip) You will find pages such as www.microsoft.com/asia/solutionMarketPlace/portal/broadcast-automation-india.htm

Check out that page with javascript turned off :shock:

At the top of each page they have as graphic text (to help with keyword density no doubt) the following...

"This site has been designed to help our visitors finding directly the information, product or service they searching in our websites"

That translates into english to... "This page is a doorway page specifically designed for search engines" ;-)

Note btw. they have got their H1 tag in by redefining it. Nothing spammy about that but a clear indication the page is designed for SEs.

This is followed by around 1000 words that Microsoft are calling "semantic content" *g* Like the following...

And dont think its just for a handful of pages. There are no less than 575 of them.

Do you think if we all fill out a spam report Google will ban Microsoft?? lol

If I was at Google however I'd be pretty miffed and have a word in their ear insisting they remove the pages asap. As if they are allowed to remain in the index, it puts Google in a VERY difficult position. If they do not act against such a high profile site, then they have absolutely no basis to act against the likes of your average online company or individual who also have to put bread on the tables. What's good for the goose has to be good for the gander. Either they change their guidelines or they take action, they cant have it both ways. It wouldnt be so bad if the DWPs were done well, these however are pretty crass and unattractive imo.

Does this mean that the new MSN search engine will gladly accept such DWP pages I wonder?It will be interesting to see how Google reacts to this.If it IS ok by Google then its the green light for all DWPs with redirects folks (reader: yeah, right).

Alan

[Note to mods: I understand if you remove this as it is a pretty sensitive issue which will not please a heap big corporation]

I understand if you remove this as it is a pretty sensitive issue which will not please a heap big corporation

Thanks for your post, Webby.

I think it does matter that this is a very big corporation, and that they are actively engaging in a activity which clearly goes against the guidelines of Google.

We normally remove the URLs and name of a company that someone reports here as violating one of the guidelines of Google. We are willing to discuss the practices, and one of the very legitimate risks of engaging in activities that are clearly against the guidelines of Google is that people will report it as spam. Maybe in this particular instance, and only in this instance, we need to break our own rule.

This isn't so much about doorway pages and javascript redirects as it is about a company purposefully taking action that places its competitor in a very precarious position, and can have a serious impact upon the services that the competitor provides.

Not long ago we extensively discussed cloaking, especially how it relates to SEO and consequences. I stated then that it was confusing, to me, that we all learn how bad it is while I had hard information that top companies we can all name employ the technique.

That thread taught me a lot about ethics in SEO - and especially that the notion I "grew up" with that there is black hat/white hat SEO is simply wrong:

There are no hats.

There are three forms of SEO tactics: 1. Techniques currently rated as 'safe'. 2. Techniques rated as risky. 3. Risk balanced and risk managed techniques.

Especially propjectphp brought up strong points in favor or SEO ethics - so much so it had to be split off in a seperate thread.

Worth reading.

It must be very challenging for SE technicians to stay ahead of the game, or in the case of cloaking to even get in the game. Although some older techniques have been dealt with, cloaking in general is not as easy to spot for SE's on an automated basis. A whole industry exists around effectively hiding the cloaking (that's cloaking the cloaking then, I guess....).

Personally I'm not comfortable with the potential risk, even though that risk is limited.

I agree with Bill; as a general rule we don't allow naming specific companies or web sites to prevent allegations flying back and forth - in this case nothing is alleged however and I think none of us can claim we're talking down a competitor here. When in doubt whether you can name a company or web site, always message a moderator first.

does google ban the site that goes against it's rules, regardless of who it is? knowing that banning microsoft will do nothing but hurt the validity of the search results. if you can't even find microsoft on a search engine, what good is it?

on the other hand if you don't ban microsoft, how do you justify banning any other site that does the same thing?

and certainly google can request that ms make changes, but ms doesn't have to do anything for google, whether google likes it or not..

wonder if microsoft considered this and just decided that "hey we've got 'em by the....."

it does hurt ms to not be listed in google though, and obviously they know that top ranking for these terms will bring them money. so if they get banned, they get no rankings and no money. so google does have some ammo

Even when reported Google doesn't seem to always ban cloaked sites. They seem to take a look at what is being cloaked with what. They have a partnership relation with NPR and happily keep listing their text transcript of audio content - something which can be put in the camp of cloaking.

For Google I think the problem is that banning, or setting PR for the whole site to zero, of "John & Jane Doe Ltd." is a whole lot easier than applying the same to Microsoft, Apple, Real, or any other large company. The amount of "Google is broken!" posts would shoot through the roof if Microsoft simply wasn't in the index anymore or would come out pretty low because of PR0. Alternative would be to fiddle with the placement (has been done before) but at what scale would you be doing this? MS' sites are quite large....

This imo is not however cloaking (some have different defintions of it though). It is imo substandard doorway pages with your run of the mill javascript redirect. They have used the nocache tag which initally led me to believe it was a cloaked DWP, it doesnt seem to be the case, although I cant know for sure.
I personally dont give a damn who uses dwps that redirect or stuff keywords etc. What riles me is the whole double standard and hypocrisy issues. Such a high profile site spamming is bound to be caught out publicly in the forums (as it has) and might well make major publications as well (it will if I have my way concerning the German press). It is giving all those DWP software merchants and seos that produce such pages some great ammo.
"Microsoft as one of Googles competitors are even getting away with using dwps with redirection and keyword stuffing.. for only $xxx YOU TOO can have zig thousand doorway pages. You can see they work....."
This really does put Google in a hell of a difficult position. Such a public display of poor doorway page toleration can not be good for them surely.

MSN clearly have no need for dwp pages to rank top. With an attractive page and little on page optimization, theyd be top purely due to their authority status. I just wish Google would stop sitting on the fence and either boot these pages (obviously not the whole domain) or change their guidelines accordingly. You can not have it both ways imo. Google must be aware of them (or are now). I'd be very interested to see if these pages are still here in a few weeks. If they still exist I will be pushing google to explain why they are tolerating these pages and not others.

why should google just remove the doorway pages from the index? If I put 575 dwp's on my site, I bet the whole domain would be banned. granted it'd also be a much higher % of the site that was spam, but still.

does google cut slack with smaller sites, and just drop the doorway pages, and give no PR penalty? if so then I'd say it's fair to do the same for ms. but if google sees this on smaller sites and insta-bans them, they should stick to their guns and do the same with ms.

ms shouldn't get any special treatment, so I'm interested in seeing how google deals with this.

In the WhenU case they did but is is speculated that had more to do with WhenU using other people's, copyrighted, content.

boot these pages (obviously not the whole domain)

You mentioned possibly 575 pages.... For a term we are aware of. There might be others. If those pages are dropped you have to prevent them from appearing in the index again - and with no guarantee they don't show up tomorrow on the next page.

I hear what you're saying though. Over time the impression I've been left with is that this type of thing is a "don't ask, don't tell" situation.

With all the phds they have, youd think they'd find a way of detecting this crap by now wouldnt you. It's their search engine however.
I do know I'd make a few high profile examples of those who engage in this kind of spam. WhenU was one, I somehow dont think M$ will be another, but they should be if you are not going to have rule for them and one rule for the rest of us kind of stance.

The real world is however that Google can do what it likes when it likes to whom it likes. They just better never ever preach to anyone about spamming their engine again at SES or elsewhere for that matter as I'll be there to put them on the spot with this issue. I hate double standards and hypocracy. Either change the guidelines or take action on those you are aware of.

I agree 100%. but lets face it, our (search engine marketers') happiness with google has very little to do with their future success. they can ban our smaller sites for doing what ms does, and continue allowing ms to do it, and let us all rant about it, and they'll still be fine.

they just need to be satisfied that they are providing relevant results to the people who don't know nor care what the hell redirects are, and that's the vast majority of the internet world.

all those people want to find ms, so google may make an exception there. all those people do not necessarily, however, want to find jon doe's site selling blue paint that decided to use 100 doorway pages ..

so I could see them making an exception and justifying it to themselves, and not liking the fact that we'll all be p***ed, but that's tough for us..

Actually, if Google dropped all the smaller to medium sites for using DWPs, they'd be out of business. Why? Think about it...it is those small to medium sized businesses that run adwords out the wazoo. Microsoft does not need to spend money on adwords, they are already there.

The problem is like Webby mentioned, double standards. And that needs to stop if we want ethical search engine practices. Google may find itself in danger if they dropped M$ but that is the price they have to pay in order to uphold their reputation.

Once a rule is made, there cannot be exception, well unless somehow somewhere, M$ has investment in Google search technology and they made an agreement. Who knows what goes on behind closed doors. I mentioned sometime ago that there could always be a conspiracy behind search engine companies and that Google could manipulate results IF they wanted to. They created the damn SERPs anyways.

So, to bring up the issue again, if M$ paid Google $5,000,000 a year to turn their eyes to all 500+ DWPs, why on earth would Google say no? And that is possible knowing how M$ works!!!

hmm I'm not so sure about that. I agree with what you are saying, but only if all those small / medium sites banded together and all started using DWP's, and all got dropped from the index together. then google may have less relevant results to show to searchers, because a selection of the sites that were dropped were relevant regardless of the fact that they were using dwp's.

but most of those sites aren't using dwp's, and aren't banding together to all decide to do it. they can't risk being dropped out because there'd be more than enough happy competitors who willingly won't use dwp's, who will take their place.

my point is that you could drop 100 sites from google's index that are selling printers, and google would still have enough relevant sites to show to users who searched for printers. they'd never know that 100 sites were dropped, nor would they care. only if an extremely large % of printer sites were dropped, would the google results start to dissatisfy the searchers and make them go to yahoo.

but all you need to do is drop one major site, microsoft, and your engine's results are called into question. putting myself into the shoes of an average searcher, if I couldn't find microsoft on a search engine, I'd think the engine was worthless. how do you miss one of the biggest sites on the net?

I just think it would take a very long time for people to notice the missing small / medium businesses, but they'd notice microsoft right away

I would imagine that Google will treat these doorway pages the same way they treat all doorway pages. They will look for an automated way of removing them from the listings (assuming they believe they're spam).

I can't imagine that Google would ever think for one minute that they should not do anything about these pages just because they're Microsoft. It's not like they have to dump all the normal MS pages, simply the doorway pages like they would for any site.

This isn't a Google issue. The bigger issue (in my mind at least) is what the heck is MS thinking? Doorway pages...lol...if it wasn't so sad it would be funny!

And the "funny" ( = sad) thing is that if the thing becomes officially outed it will take only a couple of days before a statement is released that MS had no clue, simply no idea at all; that it is all the fault of this tiny SEO company they hired "back in the days".

I'm actually thinking no one in Microsoft headquarters in Redmond knows about these pages.
It appears to be originating from the Microsoft Asia office. I wont name names, here but if you look at the bottom of the doorway page you will see a copyright notice that appears to belong to an SEO company that begins with 'T'. My theory is MS Asia have hired this company to do their optimization for this portal without the consultation of head office. I simply cant imagine that Microsoft would sanction such pages on their own domain. Can you imagine the PR heads face when told Microsoft are spamming search engines whilst about to launch their own??

How can they EVER talk about how they want to keep their search engines clean of spam, and yes, imo these DWP pages are clearly spam (pretty crass at that) with stuffed keywordsm, redirects and poor quality.I very much believe this is a rogue Microsoft office in Asia somewhere that has been foolish enough to hire an SEO who uses such dodgy methods. You'd think however such a big company with have all kinds of checks and balances regarding what goes on their website.

Google has harped on about how they want to deal with this kind of spam automatically by tweaking their algo for literally years. It cant be that difficult, they have enough phds there to sort out the spam if they really wanted to. The big problem for Google is this is a very high profile website that is flaunting its guidelines and they must know it will eventually become public knowledge. Do they ignore it and come out with "We only remove pages automatically and will be looking at incorporating an algorithm change to pick up... bla bla" or do they make an example and kick out the spammy pages. I think I know what I'd do Sergey!

If they don't take action (and I mean manual action), what message are they sending to all those webmasters who want to buy one of the umpteen doorway page generators that hammer out 30000 poor quality pages?
It is absolutely mind boggling that Microsoft have such pages on their site. I seriously doubt anyone in MS Redmond has santioned these pages. I bet someones head will be rolling soon. Especially if this breaks into some of the major press publications.

Do you guys think Bill Gates approves every addition or change under microsoft.com? I'm sure hundreds of people own their own little pieces, some in other countries. One or a couple of those people probably heard about some nifty SEO trick, got a little budget out of the mad money jar, and contracted with the firm to setup some doorway pages to try to boost SERP. When MS finds out about this I think we'll see the doorway pages perhaps turned off, but I don't think we'll see the sponsor of these pages swinging from a rope in the Hague.

I'm a bit puzzled about an earlier post that mentions their SE authority. If it's not about MS, then they shouldn't be considered to be an authority until they prove it with wisdom and excellence instead of just market share.

IMHO, Google SHOULD ban their whole enterprise, and let them fend for themself. If you want stuff that MS has on their site, use MS search, such as it is. If you want GOOD search results, use MS-free Google or any of the other giant SEs.

I'm a bit puzzled about an earlier post that mentions their SE authority. If it's not about MS, then they shouldn't be considered to be an authority until they prove it with wisdom and excellence instead of just market share.

I'm guessing that you're referring to Webby's statement here:

With an attractive page and little on page optimization, theyd be top purely due to their authority status.

I believe Alan (Webby) was referring to sites that search engines consider to be "authorities" based upon people linking to them about certain subjects.

He has a thread over at his ABAKUS SEM Forum that discusses a Search Engine Strategies Conference in London earlier this year, and part of his report of that conference includes a statement made by a Google employee that some sites are considered "authorities" and links from their pages are very helpful.

Scroll down to the section on "Link Building Basics" in his introductory post. That's the sense he was talking about when he mentioned their "authority status" rather than their reputation or market share.

nuthin,

this was actually reported a long time ago at Ihelpyou forums. 12 days prior to any post made at Webpro.

It was an interesting discovery. It's strange how information travels around the web. There's been a few looks at memes in blogs, and how ideas travel around, sometimes with attribution to the original writer or discoverer, and sometimes without. We don't know where the people posting at Webpro got a hold of this story, but it definitely was newsworthy enough so that people discussed it and shared it with others.

I agree that it would have been nice to have been noted as the discoverer of this, but news has a way of traveling around without the name of the reporter of that news attached. I'm glad that you pointed to the thread at ihelpyou. It's great to see some other opinions on the subject.

We encourage people to share ideas from their travels on the web, here. And, we encourage them to note their sources if they can. Sometimes that happens, and sometimes it doesn't.

I'd guess that you might have found those pages by surfing around with your javascript disabled. From a usability perspective, without even going into the whole cloaking and ethics issue, I guess that's another idea why those types of redirection aren't a very good idea.

Isn't this all a bit 'lets find some other way to have a go at Microsoft cos they have more money than the rest of us put together'? There are thousands of sites out there using this technique to increase their presence on the web. My feeling is:

1. Isn't the idea of a search engine to make it easier for people to find information relevant to what they are looking for..... In my view doorway pages are not 'spamming' the search engine they are making this easier to find info and expanding the 'dictionary' of the web (as it were) this and the use of RDF, XML, URI etc makes a whole new world of interlinked web sites possible - So guys think of the future.. Any 1 have the business brains to 'remove' brain dead search engines hellbent on ranking everybody for good and come up which something better and more relevant..ie just like the microsoft asia pages on a grander scale?

2. I know what you're going to say - 'Its just greed which motivates this kind of action, a company manipulating the engine in order to gain from it at the expense of others' .... well this is sort of true...and in the case of microsoft, if they did know what they were doing then it wouldn't be the first time!! But, if you own a company what would you do? Try and improve by making your company more visible (in particular make yourself more visible than your competitors). Its not against the law to do this, nor in my opinion is it unethical... Its just promoting healthy competition between like companies over a global marketplace.....its just unlucky for the rest of us that in the case of all things computer Microsoft got there first. Instead of all moaning about how s**t everything microsoft is... people might like to start trying to offer alternatives (or use linux!) os like it or not no matter how many times they get taken to court Microsoft are here to stay and they can afford to battle all of us.... nice

There are so many posts here about whether or not Google should ban MicroSoft.

Are you all forgetting that a few months back Google 'lost' overture.com?

At first it was just a few empty pages with Google not even recognising www.overture.com.

Slowly overture is returning to the Google index. To see for yourself how bad the situation still is, try a search on site:www.overture.com overture.com.

This is the serp I have just extracted - 7 empty pages in the first #10 results. Now, that is what I call banning a site from the competition. Anybody know what overture did to deserve this? - I have heard that they changed their IP address after the Yahoo reshuffle.

If you still need more convincing that Google can ban their competition, just keep on searching the serp all the way passed #100

BTW - I did this search about a week ago. Then there were far fewer empty pages. So, maybe my comment that overture is recovering in the Google serps is not correct? Anybody got a history on this that they can share?

Isn't this illegal? Copying content from another companys website - isn't this a violation of copyright laws?

I would also like to point out that the great problem for Microsoft isn't as much getting the doorway pages kicked out of Google, since the amount of traffic they loose must be quite small compared to their overall traffic. IMHO, it's more that the have been caught doing something as "unethical" as using doorway pages (in a lot of peoples opinion, this is not to debate black hat vs. white hat). It's an image problem.

BTW, if Google banned the whole Microsoft.com website because of using doorway pages, it would be a great PR stunt :-D

Besides, it would have quite a preventive effect on everyone considering the use of doorway pages and other techniques against Googles guidelines - hence improving the overall quality of their search results.

I don't agree that "a search engine that doesn't have Microsoft.com in their index is a second-rate search engine. They're just too big." People (normal non-SEO-savvy users) expect Microsoft in the top 10 results when searching for phrases that include the word "Microsoft", true enough. But on probably all other searches they wouldn't miss Microsofts site or wonder why it didn't show up. They would just think the results they got were the most relevant for the search.

On a final note - to quote the Playboy interview:

"BRIN: People send us web pages to review that are different from the ones they’ll send to users. It’s known as cloaking. They’ll put stuff on their web pages that the user can’t see—black-on-black text, for example. We consider that manipulative and work to combat it.

(...) PAGE: We have a lot of people devoted to stopping them. We do a good job."

To echo Tim, stupid is in the eye of the beholder and different folks see different things.

As others have said this is quite a thread. It's brought a number of new faces to the Forum and that's great.

In particular, I'd like to give my own welcome to algoholic, StupidScript, nuthin and Quadrille. We're honoured by your presence.

The thing that really kicked me into posting was the first posts in this thread from majik1234, moredial and brandboerge. They happened to be sequential posts and had a lot of meat in each of them. Congratulations and welcome. We hope to read lots more from you all.
:wave: :wave: :wave: :wave:

I think this more than adequately backs up something that SEO professionals have said for many years - asp and dynamic asp urls in particular are practically useless as a technology for building search engine friendly web sites... the M$ asia office has practically admitted as much in resorting to using search engine friendly static HTML pages to redirect to these complex ASP urls.

Whether it's dynamic urls in php or ASP, the problem remains the same - spiders and robots don't want to follow the links, so static methods have to be used to get this content indexed - in this case, the seo hired to do the job has used questionable redirect pages to accomplish the task.

I'd have to say that it would have been better to throw out the ASP and use something else, but when you're client is M$, I don't suppose that is much of an option... do you?

asp and dynamic asp urls in particular are practically useless as a technology for building search engine friendly web sites

I haven't had a problem with getting ASP pages spidered, listed and ranked. Even those with more than 1 parameter in the query string. I don't use any ASAPI DLLs nor ASP code to rewrite my URLs. Session IDs in the URL pose a problem and Google has said as much, regardless of which programming language you choose.

As an ecxample, take a look at the Cre8asite Resource Library which is developed using ASP. There are 16000+ pages in Google's index, some pages with 4 parameters!

I should have clarified it... google will spider the content (carefully) - but it RARELY ranks these pages well (in my experience). Other spiders don't follow the links AT ALL - this harms your inside contents page rank.

Why employ a technology which ANY spiders will NOT index - places that your site is found (ie, other directories, engines etc), all contribute to the PR. If ANYTHING can't index your content, you can't be found in as many places as a site with "static" content - ergo, your PR is lowered by using something that can not be spidered by as many bots/spiders as possible.

I call it shooting yourself in the foot... or at least entering a sprint with one leg tied up... hardly a sensible idea if you ask me....

If your experience varies significantly from the above, I'd like to know... as I would LOVE to see a dynamic URL with a decent pagerank gained organically from the site around it - I'm willing to bet that a well ranked dynamic URL's PR has almost nothing to do with the links from within the site itself - more likely that it has inherited PR from sites which link to it.

You can't rank much better than number one. Note, too, that the dynamic URL ranks higher than the static URL at number two?

... as I would LOVE to see a dynamic URL with a decent pagerank gained organically from the site around it

I have to suspect that PR was actually what you were talking about when you said dynamic pages rarely rank well? After all, every page in the index, dynamic or static, is going to rank well for the right search terms. And if they can rank well for the right search terms, they can rank well for ANY terms.

There are, I think, two things that are confusing the issue.

First, the only way to know a page's PR is to have the page included in Google's DMOZ-derived directory, where a decent approximation of PR will be displayed in the little green bar. The directory usually lags many months behind, but it was at least accurate at one time. Any other method, including the Google Toolbar, is of very dubious merit.

Second, Page Rank has a very limited, and usually indirect, effect on the SERPs. Were that not the case, a handful of sites like Adobe, W3, Yahoo and MSN would come up for just about every search.

Does the Cre8asite page found in the SERP above really have a PR 0? Probably not, but there's really no way to tell. Would a PR 0 keep it from performing well in the SERPs? Obviously not.

For highly competitive terms, of course, you need incoming links. But if it was a static page, that would still be true. Once it's in the index, ranking is determined by relevance, both on-page and off-, not by the language driving the page.

Excellent example, Ron!! Not only are those 'dynamic' URLs from Cre8 indexed, they also rank very well in the SERPs. As for PageRank? There has been an issue with what is shown in the Google toolbar for a few months now. Over and above that, there is an issue with the toolbar PR of 'dynamic' URLs .

what most people are forgetting about this whole doorway business is that yes we've all seen those low grade rubbish pages as mentioned earlier by someone . A: they are rubbish and B: they are not what doorway pages should be. I didn't make this clear before but this is the sort of naff stuff that should be removed from clogging up the internet and (i hardly dare say this..) but Microsofts doorway pages ARE very good examples of what doorways should be..

Let me expand on the notion i gave before of removing 'Google' etc for good... wouldn't it be a better idea to expand on the idea of doorway pages and turn the internet in to a more organised and highly indexed directory..instead of the (mostly) disorganised jumble of pages we have today.. imagine doorways as a directory starting at a global level and working down and down until you get to the most basic and local level, highly scalable and potentially a much more powerful way to interact with the web..
using technologies such as XML etc .... (hey just look up web ontology in ur *favourite search engine* ) makes all this possible....

First, the only way to know a page's PR is to have the page included in Google's DMOZ-derived directory, where a decent approximation of PR will be displayed in the little green bar. The directory usually lags many months behind, but it was at least accurate at one time. Any other method, including the Google Toolbar, is of very dubious merit.

Google Toolbar limited? It's an indication, but I don't care if it's limited.. the directory is hardly an indication of anything imo - of course, ymmv.

Second, Page Rank has a very limited, and usually indirect, effect on the SERPs. Were that not the case, a handful of sites like Adobe, W3, Yahoo and MSN would come up for just about every search.

again, ymmv, but my experience is that sites with higher PR do better in generic searches than those with lower PR.

Same site - same content - the lower domain is pointed to the main site, but NEVER used. One is PR6 and one is PR0 - I wonder if that has ANY bearing on the fact that the 2nd domain never gets found... perhaps - but perhaps it's more than that.

We have a client site we have 42 domains on - all of them with different PR, some 2, some 3, some 4 and some 5 - all of them pointing to the same content - all of them ranking well for DIFFERENT SERPS! One thing I can see from the logs, is that the higher the domain's PR, the more hits it is responsible for.

I didn't become a member here to argue the semantics of SEO - but it has been my observation that lower PR generally yields less traffic from Google - and I'll admit that PR is only part of the equation, but you say that the Cre8tasite resource has high SERPS for inside pages - show us some. I don't see any, but I said I wanted to see some. Provide some search terms that dynamic content in the Cre8tasite resource ranks well for. I'm waiting....